All The Dos & Don’ts of SMS Marketing in Bangladesh

Do you know what brings sales? You may ask any experienced marketers. Any response you get can be boiled down to communication. SMS is a quick medium of communication bridge. And, you can use SMS marketing in your favor. It is very effective. Yet, comparatively so inexpensive. So, we have to play it right.

So, do you know how many mobile phones are in use right now? The answer would be more 6 billion mobile phones. And do you know how many of the mobile phone users know about your brand? Well, only the ones who have heard of your brand. Text many as you can to your customers for branding. Test and retest their responses. Make your targeted audiences’ list. Now, send them your service details. Texting about discounts is another way of grabbing customers’ attention. More than the half of this 6 billion mobile phone user population opens and reads all the text they get. This makes SMS the king of market approach. No wonder it is now the most used marketing tools too.

SMS marketing is also a powerful tool to keep the engagement level high among your existing customers. Getting their attention on the regular basis is a key requirement to earn your audiences’ loyalty. Because around 98% text receivers open and read the messages they get. Among them, 90% of the receivers open the text within the first 3 minutes of receiving. And SMS has 10 times higher discount coupons redemption rate compared to printed ads.

Now you know why SMS is a good marketing approach. It can seem quite rather easy to use SMS for your own brand marketing right away now. But, establishing your brand communicating in an effective way requires market research and lots of beforehand planning. You must remember SMS marketing has its own rules and manner too. There are good practices and bad practices of it. This is was we are going to discuss today. Let us check out the top Dos in SMS marketing:

1. Adopt The Right Call-to-action for Your Brand

Our audiences are busy. Our attention span is shrinking. That’s why SMS is perfect. Causae, the text you send are expected to be short in length. Only 160 characters capacity. Takes less than 10 seconds to read. As good as this narrow space is for our audiences it creates many challenges for the marketers too. We have very little scope to reciprocate everything. But you can do it through a simple filtering process.

Remeber the five W words and one H word? Filter your message through this test. “Who” will you be sending this text to. “How” is it beneficial for your customers. “What” will be your audiences looking at this text for. “Why” your brand. “Where” your brand positioning. Till “when” your brand is offering the aforementioned benefit. Now, craft your CTA (call-to-action) accordingly. CTA should be simple. It is something you are telling your customers to do once they read your SMS.

2. Be Precise

SMS is the short version of the old-school messaging. We have to invest our communication skills to deliver the gist. A short and precise message can instantly grab your audiences’ attention. Have you heard the “kiss” method? Keep It Short and Simple is the best approach.

3. Grab The Attention At First Chance

Another thing you can turn it in your favor. Only 160 characters at your arsenal. You ought to outsmart your competitors. Try innovative approaches to effectively engage your audiences. Because if you miss the chance to capture their attention at their first gaze, they are good as gone. That is why it is good to start your text with a catchy word. Like, Sale, Special Discount. These buzzwords usually guarantee you a quality response.

4. Can You Make Your Audiences Feel Like A King?

Can you make your customer feel like they are winning in the deal you are offering? If you can, you are all set, my friend. You will rule the SMS marketing business. Just there is this one thing, we should not bug our audiences. Best practice is to take audiences’ permission. There are many smart ways you can adopt. You need to make sure your audiences are happy to give you access to their daily life. When you do all these correctly your customers will automatically feel the importance you are giving to them. Don’t forget to reward them for the precious loyalty you will enjoy. Give what they love.

5. Use Time In Your Favor

Our phone is very personal to us. That makes everything that is relating to our phone, personal too. When you text your customers it goes straight into their hands. We must practice picking the time when our audiences are at ease. Pick the appropriate hour of a day to send your texts. In fact, it is very important actually. A right message to the right person at a wrong time can only result negatively. So how do we pick the right time? It is quite rather easy if you think about it. Walk in your audiences’ shoe for a while. Right now you are reading this. You are busy. Do you want to take a discount offer right now? Keep asking yourself this one simple question. And text your customers only when the answer comes Yes.

Now, let us check out the top Don’ts in SMS marketing:

1. Try and Do Not Overwhelm Your Audiences

This is something you can’t effort to do. When you do everything right, you better know when to pause. It is all about fine tuning everything. Don’t flood them. A quick tip, don’t send any message at all for the sake of just sending it. Try and keep this in mind for the rest of your marketing career. Text only when you have some that are useful to your audiences. Be it an offer or any announcement. Make them yearn for your next text every time. Try to deliver value to your brand using SMS marketing. This one simple mindset would add benefits in real-time benefit. Otherwise, you and your business will be marked as that-annoying-texting-company. Beware, less is more.

2. Say NO to Abbreviations & Slangs

I know 160 characters can be too hard to work with sometimes. But, for our own good always and always avoid abbreviations in your text. It is just too much of a risk in a branding communication. And, just the same rule applies for slangs. Some borderline words can sound too “cool” to resist for certain targeted audiences. But, again for your company’s reputation, just walk past the temptation. Just remember, there will always some audiences who will not understand the abbreviations that came to exist last month. And there will be a big slice of the audience who will raise voice against you so loud just one you drop one single slang.

I understand you mean to save space to convey more within your limit. But, we simply can’t risk everything over one risky text. Think rationally every time you write your text. Not even as the last thing you can effort to confuse and eventually lose your customers.

3. Do Not Send Without A Strong Call-To-Action

We have discussed how to write CTAs. Now, do remember how important it is. When you send a text in marketing purpose and don’t end it with an advice, what do you expect them to do about it? It is how you maintain your communication bridge. Their reaction to your text is their response. So, without and CTA you are only building a one-sided communication. We can’t expect sales on a one-sided approach. Our audiences are busy. They need to know the heading they are expected to go to. Channel this great force of marketing.

4. SMS Marketing is For More Than Just Bringing Sales

Do you want to sale on every single of your text? It probably is not the best idea. Try a personalizing approach. Touch their emotion. Become a part of their life. Wish them on their birthday. This simple one text will get you the highest amount of benefits. Thanks to the blessing of word of mouth. Now imagine what else can you adapt to get more close to your esteemed and loyal customers. Just keep in mind, your loyal customers are your biggest sellers.

5. Branding Is The First Priority

We text to our customers because we want our customers to remember our brand. Well, simple as that. Sales we get one our audience know our brand for long enough till then they start trusting its quality. Do you trust a stranger right away as you meet them? No. We take our time. Then, we try to learn more about them. We try to listen to what others have to say about it. That is why the first expression is so important. And, this is why we widespread our brand name first. And, once you start getting the public recognition you know your every step will get you closer to more sales.

Hope these tips can help you too like it has been helping me for ages. Comment your queries and feedbacks. I’ll answer and add them to the next article. Thank you.